150 Boom Boxes and the Best Dance Party You’ve Never Been To

A member of the Elite Banana Task Force keeps the Decentralized Dance Party pumping in Boston.Photo: Sarah Hamilton/Lebeast Photography

Finding the right place to stage a Decentralized Dance Party is more art than science. Which is why Gary Lachance is standing against a railing near San Francisco’s Fisherman’s Wharf, looking perplexed. It’s nearly midnight and he’s just beginning what will be an all-night search of the city, looking for locations to flood with revelers for tomorrow night’s mobile bash. He might be tired—he just arrived in California today after a brutal 50-hour RV drive from Houston—but that doesn’t change the fact that he has less than 24 hours to find locations and plan a route. The wharf is just one of the possible stops as the party snakes through the city.

The sounds of foghorns and sea lions ripple through the darkness. He stares at the empty wharf, visualizing an ocean of revelers swarming it tomorrow night. His mind brushes past possible logistical snags until it sticks on one in particular. “Too many sea lions,” he says.

As coinventor of what is officially known as Tom and Gary’s Decentralized Dance Party, Lachance has to balance the meticulousness of an urban planner with the conviviality of a good host. Since 2009 he’s held more than 50 semi-spontaneous outdoor throw-downs in major cities, insisting on a leave-no-trace ethos, noise complaints and perturbed marine mammals included. It looks like Pier 39 won’t make the cut after all. Lachance gets back on his bike, as do his ridemates—a group of superpowered partyers who help scout locations in each city and keep the events running smoothly. They’re called the Elite Banana Task Force. And, yes, they wear banana suits. “It’s impossible to have a bad time in a banana suit,” Lachance says.

If you flipped on the local news last year, you may have caught snippets of DDP’s latest exploits. Its goal: to free us from our humdrum nightlife. In Austin, a partygoer dressed in a lab coat leans into the YNN news camera: “I could be spending $30 going to a bar and doing the same-old, same-old,” he says in a hoarse voice. “This is something different. This is something new. And it’s free!” In the video, you can see people carrying daisy-chained boom boxes, their tuner knobs duct-taped into place to ensure that all stay locked to a vacant radio frequency. That’s what lets them groove to the crowd-fueled PA system: volumes cranked, the DDP’s pirate radio broadcasts anything from booty bass to Jimmy Soul’s “If You Wanna Be Happy.”

“Nightclubs are too forced,” says Kyle Del Bonis, who attended a New Year’s Eve DDP in LA. “Most DJs sit around like lumps, unengaged with their audience.” Decentralized Dance Parties attempt to subvert that formula utterly, burning the velvet rope and bringing the inside out. What makes them sustainable for the organizers, though, is how mobile they are. Once DDP arrives in a city—heralded by Twitter and Facebook and with travel costs underwritten via Kickstarter or Indiegogo crowdfunding—the nerve center of the operation can be carried by a single person. A high-powered FM transmitter hooks into an antenna, which in turn is rigged to a backpack. Inside is a vintage disco mixer (held in place with a rubber band), mic receivers, a 12-volt battery, and a separate Ramsey FM transmitter—and a blue slipper “for good luck.”

Ryan Stomberg—aka “Tom” (in sunglasses)—oversees the boom box return at a DDP event at last year’s South by Southwest conference in Austin, Texas. Photo: Jon Snyder

And all of it is controlled (symbolically) by a Nintendo Power Glove—an old-school videogame peripheral that is as revered by nostalgic ’80s babies as it was ignored in its day. Over the years, the Power Glove has become a symbol of DDP’s abandon. The glove was at a DDP when people skied down subway escalators and when DDP-goers swarmed ferryboats with pogo sticks and trampolines. It was there in February 2011, coaxing 20,000 Canadians out of taverns onto Vancouver’s streets. And it’ll be here tomorrow night when DDP’s San Francisco party—the theme is “strictly business”—hits the streets.

Right now, though, Ryan Stomberg bikes alongside Lachance on Market Street’s sidewalk. A guy named Tom Kuzma was Lachance’s original partner and cofounder. But after they had a falling-out, a different person took over the role of “Tom”—the 27-year-old Stomberg is the third. (Lachance looks to be in his thirties but will give his age only as “18 till I die.”) Stomberg’s orange flannel fanny pack—the JammyPack—plays music continuously amid the gentle hum of the overnight street sweepers. He points northeast. “I don’t think we’re gonna have any problem parading down that block,” he says. Farther east is the contorted Lego-block sculpture and fountain in Justin Herman Plaza, the party’s intended endpoint. Lachance computes all of this, and the Bananas ride on. Thanks in no small part to this type of extensive preparty legwork, DDP has had no difficulty with law enforcement—indeed, officers often end up escorting the crowd along city streets. “Cops expect to find a Jäger-guzzling frat boy leading this,” says Lachance’s friend Kerry Leonard, another Banana. Instead they find a deep-thinking Canadian whose vision of street-level abandon is part of what he calls a “Libertarian mindset” about how the world should be.

How DDP Broadcasts Music to the Masses

The “tech” behind Tom and Gary’s mobile dance party.—D.M.

1 TRANSMITTER A Ramsey FM35 transmitter with a radio-frequency output power of 1 watt—duct-taped to a cutting board to avoid accidental button mashes. Wired through that is a Tru-Match 100 broadcast antenna encased in PVC pipe, with a max input of 25 watts.

2MIXER The transmitter is tethered to a 1980s Realistic Stereo Disco Mixer with two VU meters regulating signal output and a 12-volt battery pack, held together with a rubber band. The mixer/battery duo constitutes the bulk of the backpack’s 50-pound load.

3JUKEBOX Load an MP3 player with tunes—DDP staple “I Beg Your Pardon” by Kon Kan, for instance—and plug it directly into the mixer’s tape input. A Sennheiser wireless mic transmitter plugs into a separate input, allowing organizers to make announcements through partygoers’ boom boxes (which are all set to the same vacant radio frequency).

Before Tom and Gary began their Decentralized Dance Party, there were the lawn-gnome thefts. The two grew up in a region of northern Ontario known for its high rates of violence, alcoholism, and teen pregnancy. Adolescent diversion came in the form of “liberating” garden gnomes from neighbors’ homes. On one mission, Tom and Gary populated a parking lot at a hydroelectric plant with some 100 statues. They later tried to get to 1,000 but instead ended up with some hefty lawyer fees and several hours of community service.

Years later, the pair ended up together in Vancouver and again became a disruptive force on the social scene—smashing bottles over their own heads, dancing in Dumpsters, emptying vacuum cleaner bags onto each other. “House parties played music we’d hate and everyone was just trying to be cool,” Lachance says. “We’d be in a bathroom or a corner of the yard with the freaks, doing our own thing, getting naked or breaking into the attic.” People just weren’t uninhibited enough for their tastes. That’s when it hit them: Create a better party.

First came mass midnight bike rides through Vancouver. The boom boxes were strapped to a rear rack, and Lachance DJ’ed with an iPod shuffle he got through a bank promotion. When its battery died, cyclists synced to a radio station to keep the party going. It was the innovation that would lead to DDP. They scrounged for extra boom boxes, and Lachance soon amassed hundreds of them in his apartment. Stashed into pantries. Stacked along bathroom walls.

The first DDP, held in August 2009, was more of a dance circle than a parade. Kuzma and Lachance crashed a bonfire party using an underpowered FM transmitter; veer 10 feet from it and you’d lose reception. They wanted a bigger bash. At the next DDP, they met an electrical engineer named Andrew Bruce Lau, who had happened upon the party after getting separated from his Critical Mass bike ride—where he did radio broadcasts using a 300-watt sound system and a beefy transmitter. The duo was impressed, so Lau helped them fashion a similar getup. “They’re doing the world a favor,” Lau says, “so I thought I’d give ‘em a hand.”

It’s Friday evening, barely 12 hours after Stomberg and Lachance (and the Bananas) have finished their scouting ride, and the San Francisco DDP is beginning to show signs of life. At 8 pm, as instructed via Facebook, Twitter, and email blast, partyers begin gathering around a statue in San Francisco’s Union Square. Lachance exits a nearby truck wearing a beige corduroy coat, gabardine pants, faux-snakeskin boots, and a gold “Supervisor” badge. With his blond flattop and sleek build, he calls to mind a thrift-store Dolph Lundgren. He walks toward the Lau-inspired FM transmitter—the DDP crew calls it the Splack Pack—and hefts it onto his shoulders with the help of a Banana. The banana-clad roadies have one simple charge from Lachance: “Keep the party going.” They begin by booting up flanks of boom boxes while revelers pack the square. In keeping with the party’s “strictly business” theme, they’re dressed like yuppie extras in an ’80s movie, and power suits abound. Lachance observes the tide of some 1,500 people behind his shield sunglasses, and then his voice thunders through hundreds of radios tuned to 87.9 FM: “The party. Will begin. In five minutes.”

Stomberg leads the initial crowd from Union Square down to Powell Street. He’s dressed as Party Moses, complete with an orange top hat and a blue police beacon taped to a golf driver that he thrusts skyward. Black Box’s “Strike It Up” fills the air. “If you have any troubles,” Lachance alerts everyone over the airwaves, “find a Banana. They’re expertly trained in fixing boom boxes.” Parents pushing their kids in strollers halt at a crosswalk; passing DDPers bombard them with high fives. Throngs spill onto the street and overtake a cable car. “Stick to sidewalks and respect public property,” Lachance commands. But the conductor loves it. And as the party rolls past restaurant windows, cooks inside dance.

A woman who has come into possession of a stuffed pony humps it on the ground. A man hovers above her with a megaphone, shouting Meat Loaf lyrics.

That loss of inhibition is fundamental to DDP, as explained in the party manifesto on the group’s website. (Every revolution needs a manifesto.) Partying, the preamble states, is “forgetting who you are while remembering what you are.” Falling into this policy are things like crowd control, peaceful interaction with local authorities, and respecting public property—Bananas rewalk routes afterward gathering detritus and demolished boom boxes.

Others are listening. Encouraged by Tom and Gary’s online videos, one San Francisco resident engineered what he calls a portable party pack, equipped with strobe lights, antenna, and transmitter. Emails from around the world flood Lachance’s inbox, requesting local chapters. In Victoria, British Columbia, one such newly sanctioned duo exists under the nom de bacchanal Hugh and Larry’s Decentralized Dance Party. “The ones who have the wherewithal to go through all the trouble usually aren’t morons,” Lachance says. “It takes passion.”

He leads the gyrating bash into a BART subway station. As dancers descend escalators, the nearby plaza devolves into good-natured mayhem. A break-dance battle erupts between a pair dressed as Teletubbies Laa-Laa and Po. An oversize stuffed pony crowd-surfs; people double-Dutch with jump ropes fashioned from their neckties.

Eventually they surface on Market Street and head toward Justin Herman Plaza. A 60-year-old man bolts out of a Carl’s Jr. and follows the mass. Four blocks later, the throng has reached 3,000—and inside an E-Trade Financial center, the board displays dismal stock numbers. “The Nasdaq is down, but everyone’s partying,” Banana Chris Smith says, while a sea of people dance, pop-locking in the plaza confines. The security guards inside look appropriately baffled. A police officer warns Lachance that public sound reproduction past 10 pm violates the city’s noise ordinance. But he permits one last song, so Lachance scrabbles at his iPod with the Nintendo Power Glove. A Meat Loaf song begins.

No one asks why. Instead, a woman who has come into possession of the stuffed pony humps it on the ground. A man hovers above her with a megaphone, shouting out lyrics along with the song: “But I won’t … do … that!” It is, somehow, the essence of DDP—at least to the extent that something so atomized can have an essence. It’s people interacting, or just acting. Hell, it’s a be-in, albeit one that’s less political than recreational.

The song ends, and the crestfallen mob disperses—but not before thanking Stomberg for the best night of their lives and shaking Lachance’s Power Gloved hand. And just like that, the DDP crew piles back into its CanaDream RV to head to Portland, Oregon, the last stop on the American tour. More than 600 C and D batteries are stacked neatly inside. What with batteries, the RV rental, and plane flights, the Strictly Business Tour has been costly. Despite Lachance’s planning prowess and fund-raising acumen, it has put him $5,000 in the hole. Luckily, since last May DDP has received sponsorship from Rayovac: batteries for all their parties. It’s not a new RV, but at least it’s enough to keep the boom boxes running.